Exercise alone doesn't make you lose weight

Agreed, John Oliver would have a field day with this.

Avoiding carbohydrates? How about vegetables and pulses? Plenty of carbs in them.

Okay, sans snark.... avoiding refined carbohydrates perhaps?

The deadly one for me is dairy. It's omnipresent and I've attributed its component parts to symptoms ranging from brain fog to elevated heart rate to inflamed joints. Fortunately whey seems to be an exception, so protein shakes are OK. Cut out dairy and avoid most sugars, and I have very few remaining issues. But I also admit my experience is personalized; everyone probably has foods that they aren't compatible with, but can tolerate "enough" to dismiss for a single meal - and people who never encounter long-term issues just happened to get lucky.

Hey it would impact metabolic rates if you would be body building. More muscle = more calories to feed them. In article you can see as well that weight loss was connected with slower metabolic rate.

But walking as written in article is easily filled up with couple cookies.

Other thing is I don't like term "losing weight" it is much better to lose fat and even gain weight building some muscle.

Should be close enough - John Oliver on Sugar: https://youtu.be/MepXBJjsNxs

I'd love to see a RandallMunroe `what if processed food was reduced to almost zero`. How many things would disappear (factories, their consumption and polluants, shops, pesticides), how much healthier would we be, wealthier, how much free time doctor would have for worthy cases. The whole shebang.

yep when I had a 7 mile each way bike ride as part of my commute I lost a lot of weight quickly

High intensity interval exercise has repeatedly been shown to lead to increased metabolic rate for hours after exercise with minimal increase in hunger.

You have to put on quite a lot of muscle to raise your resting metabolic rate, and this probably isn't practical for most people.

Resistance training (weight lifting etc) can be a great way to do interval exercise and get a real sweat going. Kettle bells for instance are particularly in vogue, although there are plenty of other methods.

Resistance training is great for many other reasons, and we should all be doing some. Increased strength and coordination is a solid investment in your future health.

Lower intensity exercise (eg jogging) does unfortunately increase hunger, and it is far, far easier to 1000 calories than to "burn them off".

Some people are simply predisposed to put on fat and retain it. Aesthetically this may not be what they wish for, and that can lead to desperate dieting and more exotic attempts at fat loss.

It is entirely possible to be "fat but fit" so health measures other than estimating subcutaneous adipose tissue are necessary to understand your health.

It is also possible to be "thin outside fat inside" ie to look thin but have terrible cardiovascular health.

The summary is that most of us should probably eat more green veggies and more fibre but less overall, and do more exercise. Any specific formula for this is a distraction from the general message, but if it works for, good.

On mobile, apologies for lack of references.

It's frustrating that the article discusses a bunch of different research and meta analysis and you counter that with your anecdote, especially since your first sentence ("avoiding certain foods") is supported by the research whereas the rest isn't.

I have the opposite experience. I tend to lose weight when I do 30 mins - 1 hour of cardio per day.

I'd still always recommend cardio instead of weight training. Cardio is much more healthier than weight training.

It has been shown plenty of times that running/walking regularly increases life expectency quite dramatically. I've yet to find an article that says the same thing about big biceps :)

> I've always lost fat when I gained muscles without changing my diet that much.

The fat-burning aspect of muscle growth has been fundamental for me. 45 minutes of weight-lifting has had a far greater effect on fat reduction than 90 minutes of cardio.

I don't know that I can say it's "weight-lifting" vs. "cardio", but rather the specifics of what those entail. I do free weights, and feel like I work my body out better than the cardio work that I've done.

But I'm with you in that respect -- building muscle is effective for fat loss for me, and I achieve that better through weight-lifting vs. cardio.

Hey, 10kgs in 42 days is great!

I've been recording my weight every day (almost) for 1033 days so far. I'd already lost ~20kg before that, and lost the next 10kg in 35 days, by comparison. At my lowest weight, day 559, I'd lost 27kg from when I started recording (about 80% of the total I want to lose).

Unfortunately, at day 1033 I've gained about 12kg since my lowest point, so overall loss of 15kg (58% of total to lose). So lost a bit of ground and seem to have really hit a plateau in the last year.

This has been with the assistance of a lapband as of four years ago.

Not to be discouraging, but it seems you make the big losses early and it gets harder. Best of luck.

I would go further and say the title literally says the opposite of the information contained in the article. It clearly says that exercise alone does make you lose weight. It just adds the observation that very few people actually try exercise alone---most try a combination of exercise and increasing their calorie consumption, which unsurprisingly doesn't work.

It also mainly focuses on large studies where all excercise is lumped into an 'hours per day' category.

Not one mention of strength training vs the light-to-medium cardio that people consider to be 'exercise'.

>So for ideal health aim somewhere between the two extremes.

This is generally good advice for everything in life.

> Cardio alone with no change to diet will not help you lose weight but will help you live longer.

Technically, cardio with no change in diet will make you lose weight (unless you're a medical miracle that disobey the laws of thermodynamics). The problem is, of course, that people who do cardio usually also eat more (a "reward" after the run?).

Also, I'm not sure you can build muscle with a keto diet - you build muscle by using muscle (i.e. lifting weights). In general, having more muscle is very healthy, especially as we get older.

"Building muscle with keto style diet will help you lose the weight..."

Please say that it will help lose fat quickest, because gaining muscle will add to body weight. Fun thing is that you might change composition loosing fat and gain muscle and gain weight. So losing weight is not good term.

> Building muscle with a keto style diet will help you lose the weight the quickest but probably isn't the healthiest long term.

Why not?

Do you honestly believe that the people advocating alternative plans (low carb, etc) don't understand this argument? Why just keep on repeating it?

You state facts, here are some additional ones from the article:

* “people who simply dieted experienced greater weight loss than those who combined diet and exercise.”

* “You would have to walk for more than 45 minutes to burn off the 300 calories from eating just three cookies.”

* “researchers concluded, “active, ‘traditional’ lifestyles may not protect against obesity if diets change to promote increased caloric consumption.”

* “It’s calorie intake that is really fueling the obesity epidemic.”

Personally, the most weight I’ve ever lost was over a six month period of zero exercise, but with a restricted diet. (Consequences of a work assignment out of town.)

My most physically active periods (3-4 hours daily in the ocean) have been accompanied by no weight loss, sometimes even weight gain.

Different foods have different effects on your metabolism, and, relevant to this article, different effects on weight. There is very strong evidence on this point. You are going to be better off eating 200 calories of protein than 200 calories of sugar. The idea that "all calories are equal" has been quite damaging to public health.